This Sunday: Silent March to End Stop & Frisk

This Father’s Day, the Progressive Caucus will be joining civil rights, faith, labor and community groups in a massive march to end the NYPD’s policy of stop, question, and frisk. To express how serious and solemn this issue is to our communities, the march will be silent. The silent march was first used in 1917 by the NAACP to draw attention to race riots that tore through communities in East St. Louis, Illinois, and build national opposition to lynching.

The facts about stop and frisk clearly illustrate that this practice is discriminatory, ineffective, and out of control. In 2011, NYPD officers conducted 685,724 street stops, a more than 600 percent increase since Mayor Bloomberg’s first year in office when officers conducted 97,000 stops. Nine out of 10 people stopped are totally innocent, meaning they are neither arrested nor ticketed. No gun is retrieved in 99.9 percent of stops. And though they only account for 4.7 percent of the city’s population, black and Latino males between the ages of 14-24 accounted for 41.6 percent of stops in 2011.

We hope you’ll come out on Sunday at 3pm to help make a powerful statement against racial profiling. The march begins at 110th St and 5th Ave and will progress south to 78th St. Make sure to follow #silentmarchnyc, #changetheNYPD and #racialprofiling, and chime in today at 2pm for a Twitter rally to raise awareness about Sunday’s march.